Case Studies

Overview

Together with our partners, Heirloom Computing works with some of the biggest companies in the world. Our clients are typically in the Financial Services & Government verticals. We also work directly with many Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who deliver commercial applications covering other industries such as Banking, Insurance, Retail, and Healthcare.

Below is a representative selection of case studies. We do not publish the name of our clients if the replatforming project is active, or we are restricted by a partner NDA (this is typical), or we do not have the client’s permission.

Financial Services

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

PROJECT

SOLUTION

RESULTS

FinTech, Banking

A Universal Payments Company with a digital payments processing platform (used by thousands of banking & brokerage clients).

Modernization of application platform handling multi-trillion $ transactions per day, to enable application deployment to the cloud and distribution of services through new digital channels.

Duration: 9 months.

The system was replatformed from an IBM Power System running proprietary COBOL systems to an Heirloom PaaS Java application running on commodity x86 Linux hardware.

Project implementation was led by the client with direct support from Heirloom staff.

Along with migration to an agile platform, improving performance was a critical success factor.

The cost of infrastructure required for the application was cut by 70%, delivering a significantly more cost-effective solution for customers, and improving margins for the client.

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

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SOLUTION

RESULTS

Insurance, Retirement, Investing

A multi-billion $ financial services company with primary products & services focused on managing plans for retirement in the USA.

RESULTS

Credit Cards, Banking, Investing

A leading global provider of credit card & banking services.

The client’s current IBM Mainframe platform is vertically-constrained. Consequently it is not capable of taking on the additional processing required without a substantial investment, and adherence to a future-state that perpetuates the same constrained computing model.

Duration: 9 months.

The batch processing environment (consisting of large COBOL, DB2, and JCL workloads) was recreated in the Cloud using Heirloom PaaS.

Project implementation is being led by the client with direct support from Heirloom staff.

An Heirloom PaaS cloud-native deployment provides the client with the ability to dynamically scale-out (and scale-back) batch processing based on parameters that were not previously available.

Batch processing can now be executed in parallel, significantly reducing the time required to complete.

A microservices model is now possible so batch transactions can be executed in real-time.

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

PROJECT

SOLUTION

RESULTS

Insurance

A UK based insurance company with over 20 million customers, operating in European markets.

Competitive engagement to select vendor.

Corporate strategy is to replace IBM Mainframes with open-systems and cloud computing infrastructure. Primary drivers are the need to replatform workloads to an agile ecosystem, and cut costs.

Duration: 5 months.

Heirloom PaaS was used to quickly & accurately replatform online and batch workloads to the Java platform.

Heirloom was selected as the preferred vendor for the client’s IBM Z and IBM i worldwide replatforming program.

Project planning for next phase is now in progress, involving multiple locations.

Government

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

PROJECT

SOLUTION

RESULTS

Federal Government

A federal government agency.

POC to replatform a critical benefits processing application from a Mainframe system that was originally deployed in the mid-1970’s.

Duration: 4 weeks.

Application code was replatformed with no code changes. Application data was migrated from proprietary hierarchical store to a relational database using Heirloom’s automated file transformation tooling.

Results from batch processing with Heirloom PaaS were an exact match.

Performance on a 4-core system was 2X faster.

With POC gate cleared, and end-state confirmed with Heirloom PaaS as the platform of choice, planning for replacement of all Mainframe applications is now underway.

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

PROJECT

SOLUTION

RESULTS

European Government

Social Security agency.

Replatforming multi-district fraud and benefits processing application from the IBM Mainframe to Java.

17,900 MIPS, 35M LOC, 35GB EBCDIC data

Duration: 7 months

Application code was automatically recompiled to Java with no code changes required to the original COBOL application. Relational data was migrated to the System Integration partner’s in-memory distributed SQL database.

Application was deployed to a converged infrastructure platform running Linux with 128-cores.

Batch transaction processing rate of 4,400 transactions per second, with average response time of 120ms.

Results verified as 100% accurate.

Business

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

PROJECT

SOLUTION

RESULTS

Information

OCLC is a global library cooperative supporting thousands of libraries around the world.

Replatforming of mission-critical online and batch applications as part of strategic imperative to enhance business agility and shutdown the IBM Mainframe.

1000+ users, 225+ screens, 750+ job streams.

Duration: 3 months.

Applications were replatformed to Java Application Servers running on Red Hat Linux hosted on VMware instances. COBOL, CICS, BMS & JCL artifacts were recompiled without any changes. RACF was migrated to Open LDAP.

OCLC realized a ROI in 6 months.

“Heirloom’s PaaS platform and outstanding project team delivered on the promise of automatically transforming and deploying a complex mainframe workload to 100% Java in 90 days” said Tim Schwab, Director of Enterprise Applications.

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

PROJECT

SOLUTION

RESULTS

Cloud Provider

A joint project with AWS to deliver a “Mainframe Application in the Cloud” showcase.

Primary objective was to create a cloud-native implementation of an OLTP workload that leveraged the elasticity of AWS.

Duration: 6 weeks.

Heirloom developed a strict implementation of the industry standard transaction processing benchmark, based on the TPC-C specification.

This COBOL/CICS application was run on an IBM Mainframe and then replatformed (without any code changes) to AWS with Heirloom PaaS, and deployed as a Java application to Apache Tomcat (in a scalable AWS Beanstalk environment).

INDUSTRY

CLIENT

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RESULTS

Retail

A major French retailer of groceries, hardware, and household items.

Offloading of Pacbase development from the mainframe to PC workstations.

Duration: 4 weeks.

The Heirloom PaaS SDK was configured to work in IBM compatibility-mode (including use of the EBCDIC code page). This provided an agile modern Eclipse IDE for compiling and validating Pacbase applications.

Significant reduction in Mainframe MIPS usage through offloading of application development processing to PC workstations.